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Book Discovery Improved: A New Site to Discover Good Reads Instead of Cheap Deals

BookBub has been the incontested giant in book discovery and has gathered a huge following, over 1.5 million subscribers, in a matter of a few months. But there's a new cool site on the scene, a David to BookBub's Goliath.

It has an innovative business model that focuses more on getting in the reader's hands the books they want to read rather than bringing them books free or at a deep discount, as BookBub does.Who's this bright new kid on the block? Aptly called The Fussy Librarian (click here to visit the site), it has now come of age since I last blogged about it a month ago (see here).

The Fussy Librarian started this summer by gathering info about readers' preferences, giving them the choice of 30 genres in fiction and non-fiction plus 10 contentoptions identifying the level of sex and violence they are looking for (see their subscribe page here).

Then in September it opened up to authors to submit their books (see here)

Now, here's the clever part and where it differs from BookBub that concentrates only on the price of affirmed best sellers or books that have won critical appraisal in the main press and literary journals.What the Fussy Librarian does is totally different. They want to unearth the good reads that have gotten buried under the tsunami of self-published books.

To do this, they've set up a different kind of barrier to entry for authors - if your book doesn't comply with these requirements, it won't be accepted. Here they are, in their own words:

10 reviews and a 4.0 rating on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or 20 reviews and a 3.5 rating.

A quality cover. In their own words: "We can’t stress this enough – it doesn’t matter
how brilliant your writing is if you have an amateur-looking cover".

A price of $5.99 or less.

This is very clever, because:

(a) they've maintainted the price range under control; the books on offer on their site will always be (relatively) cheap, BookBub beware! (b) they aim for a quality read by focusing on three tell-tale signs: (1) number of reviews, (2) ratings and (3) a professional book cover. This is essential to help keep out the self-published, vanity "slushpile" that so much irritates readers and rightly so. So far, 500 books were already submitted to them and they are about to start mailing recommendations to their subscribers. They are open for submission and the waiting period before recommendations are sent out is still short for certain genres because of the relative scarcity of submissions in those areas. This concerns, as of now: all
nonfiction,
action-adventure,
African-American,
children/middle
grade,
literary
fiction,
historical
fiction,
police
procedurals,
religious
fiction,
romance
erotic,
biography/memoir. So if you have written in those genres, hurry to submit your book! If, on the other hand, your book is romance, be prepared for a long wait before a recommendation is sent out: 96 days!

They have also shared their data on genre rankings based on what their readers have said they liked. In the top ten categories, you find:

Mysteries

Thrillers

Women's
fiction

Historical
fiction

Romance
contemporary

Literary fiction

Young adult

Fantasy/steampunk

Science fiction

Biography/memoir

That's interesting because it corresponds pretty well to the rankings on Amazon and in the market in general. This implies that they have managed to gather a respectable and representative mass of readers - in short, they are headed in the right direction.

Needless to say, I submitted my boomer novel, A Hook in the Sky (you can find it here on Amazon where it has now 28 reviews, but it's also available on all other e-book stores, including Apple, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords). And I certainly hope to find new readers thanks to the Fussy Librarian!

A closing comment:Sites like The Fussy Librarian are still far away from book-discovery sites like the UK's Whichbook (see here) that rely on sophisticated reader-profiling tools and can count on a large revolving team of readers coming from UK libraries and literary journals and are willing to check on book quality ( currently, some 70 people). But although Whichbook has developed an original tool for book research on the basis of many criteria, it is not a commercial marketing tool as such and does not contact you on your email box with recommendations.

What a pity that the two systems can't come closer together! What's your opinion as a reader or writer or both?

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